After being mysteriously rescued from a potential plane crash, scientist Cal Meacham
(Rex Reason) is sent some electronic components from an unknown supply company, along
with detailed instructions for constructing an 'interocitor'. Once completed, he discovers
that it is a highly advanced communication device, the building of which has served as
an intelligence test. Meacham is invited by the strange Exeter (Jeff Morrow) to join
a group of mysterious scientists who are apparently working to end all war through research
and an accumulation of uranium.
His curiosity piqued, he agrees and boards an automated plane to an unnamed destination.
Encountering an old flame, Dr Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue), upon arrival proves a minor
distraction as Exeter shortly reveals his real plans. A representative of Metaluna, a
planet under attack from galactic neighbours, and which requires huge amounts of energy
to defend itself, Exeter has suddenly been instructed to return home. In a last desperate
attempt to revitalise their defences, he brings Meacham and Adams along.
"This Island Earth has everything against it," as Raymond Durgnat wrote
in his notable extended treatment of the film. For him it was fantasy, science fiction
"slanted at adolescents... a routine product from a studio with no intellectual
pretensions, it has no auteurs, its artistic 'texture' is largely mediocre - and for
all that, it has a genuine charge of poetry and of significant social feeling." The
average fan may express it in a different way, but the affection remains. The merciless
editing-down and treatment a few years back at the hands of the MST3K team notwithstanding,
This Island Earth is a film still remembered fondly by those who treasure the SF
cinema of the 1950s, and celebrate the peculiar axis where pulp meets poetry.
Unusually for this period, This Island Earth is a SF film made in colour - in
fact one of the last films to made using three-strip Technicolor, the bright vividness
of which adds a garish sense of realism to the surreal events on show. Only War Of
The Worlds (1953) or Forbidden Planet (1956), out of those contemporary productions
I can think of had comparable impact. Even more notable is the film's view of atomic
research, the benefits of which it is optimistic. Such a stance was of a piece with
the times: in 1954, just the year before Raymond Jones' novel was adapted to the screen,
the first controlled fission reactor appeared, which promised North Americans a seemingly
endless supply of electricity. Cal Meacham, hero of the piece (a slightly wooden actor,
something of a poor man's Stewart Granger) is introduced to viewers as one with an apt
"far away, visionary look." He's currently investigating the industrial application
of nuclear power, the unlimited potential of which will suggest salvation for the energy
starved Metalunans. Despite his average looking exterior, Meacham is something of a talent,
for in assembling the interocitor from the 2,487 parts supplied (none of which can be
replaced) he easily passes the mental task posed by his new masters. This part of the
plot was apparently carried over from the original novel. Less happy as a device are
the 'neutrino rays', via which the Metalunans perform most of their more impressive
activities, such as saving Meacham's plane at the start or menacing escaping cars, the
zap-bang operation of which sometimes brings events to closer to B-movie level.
This Island Earth is divided into two halves. The first shows Meacham on Earth
with his friends and colleagues, deep in the investigation of Earth bound phenomena.
A lot of this is grounded in the fears of 1950s' America, where aliens and the strange
are frequently associated with socialistic malevolence and the Red Menace. In another
film, the enigmatic Exeter could easily have be shown as promulgating the harsh communistic
ideas of invaders which so dominated the genre elsewhere (his associate Brack has the
necessary air of coercive-in-waiting, while the mind control technology which explicitly
threatens recalls that of another colour SF of the immediate period, Invaders From
Mars, 1953). Instead of proving a bogeyman, however, aside from the matter of destroying
a few humans upon his hurried departure, Exeter eventually emerges as patriotic in his
own cause; humane and as he contemplates his own fate, ultimately a little wistful in
regards to his place in the cosmos. The second half of the film, which begins with the
hurried departure into space, has a different focus - an impression aided immensely by
the scenes of galactic grandeur, some of which were apparently directed by an uncredited
Jack Arnold. As others have noted such moments represent some of the few times in SF
cinema that the intellectualised worlds of wonder created in such pulp magazines as
Campbell's Astounding Stories were fleetingly created on screen as opposed to
the B-movie horrors common elsewhere. (A similar sense of awe attends the viewing of
the underground workings in Forbidden Planet.) Visually impressive for its time,
This Island Earth received an Academy Award for its technical effects, the look
of the production, once the plot reaches Metaluna - a doomed, hollowed out planet, battered
by meteorites, its iconic figure of the mutant menacing and mute in attendance, is still
memorable. This famous creature with the exposed cranium, who menaces Ruth Adams in her
glass tube, apparently cost the producers $24,000 and remains the single most indelible
image.
Much of the film has the vividness of pulp fiction recreated successfully on screen -
that is to say something of a dream, a hallucination too real to be true. Commentators
have also picked up on the way the story questions issues of contemporary American
isolationism, by explicitly placing a responsibility of mankind in outer space, within
the needs of a distant culture. But however one interprets the film its title, and the
vision, still remain etched in popular SF culture, this despite the acknowledged hokeyness
of the plot and the variable acting along the way. A product of a more innocent age,
perhaps, and without the benefits of modern CGI but for many, This Island Earth
remains a beloved relic. Proof of this is the price of the original release on Amazon
(a bare edition with speckly picture and no extras) which can go as high as $200 - although
a more recent issue, still crying out for extra documentary features is more viable.
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